Martin Amis | Books | The Guardian The Guardian Close 1949- "I have a god-like relationship with the world I've created. It is exactly analogous. There is creation and resolution, and it's all up to me." Birthplace Swansea, South Wales Education A swift series of crammers (he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising") and Exeter College, Oxford. Other jobs Editorial assistant on the Times Literary Supplement; literary editor at the New Statesman Did you know? He worked on the script for Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! "I rather liked the film," he commented, "though it contained not a word I wrote." Critical verdict All his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis complained of as a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English"; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop. His standing has fallen a little recently; John Updike lamented Night Train's "post-human" quality, while Heavy Water contained, along with episodes of mature brilliance, some old pieces and recycled ideas.

Recommended works The Rachel Papers is an exuberant piece of self-conscious juvenilia; Money is perhaps his best book, but London Fields the most compulsive. Influences Admits to the biggies: Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce. Now read on He has spawned a host of down-and-dirty impersonators: "People try to write like Martin," admits Julian Barnes. "There's something very infectious and competitive about it." Perhaps the nearest thing to an Amis successor is Will Self, though Zadie Smith echoes his prose rhythms. Adaptations The Rachel Papers (1989, dir Damien Harris) was a solid, unflashy adaptation of Amis's first novel, with Dexter Fletcher, Ione Skye and James Spader. Amis also wrote Saturn 3 (1980, dir Stanley Donen), a critically slated sci-fi featuring the bizarre pairing of Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel. Recommended biography He has written an acclaimed memoir, Experience, about his relationship with his father Kingsley Amis, his own writing career and his traumatic dentistry.

It is also an intimate portrait of fractures and healing in his family life, including the discovery of a long-lost daughter and the disappearance and murder of his cousin. Criticism Novelist Adam Mars-Jones' Venus Envy has some perceptive things to say about Amis and his contemporaries. Useful links and work online Work online Kingsley Amis | Books | The Guardian Kingsley Amis "Any proper writer ought to be able to write about anything." Birthplace City of London; St John's, Oxford Other jobs Academic (though his thesis on Victorian poetry was rejected), army officer, critic Did you know? He produced a particularly violent James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, in 1968, under the pseudonym Robert Markham. Critical verdict A prodigious output was achieved by an unflinching schedule of 500 words each day. His public perception developed from angry young man in the 50s to reactionary old fogey in the 80s; he, and a critical minority, took issue with both stereotypes. He received the Booker Prize (The Old Devils) in 1986, plus a CBE and knighthood for services to literature.

Recommended works The youthful and enthusiastic Lucky Jim is a cogent reminder of how much the English novel has changed, as well as being instrumental in its transformation; The Old Devils a bitterly funny (and vice versa) controlled tour de force. Influences The only novelist he admitted to reading was George McDonald Fraser, author of the sex 'n' swashbuckling Flashman series. He was, however, an admirer and friend of Philip Larkin; they were both "savagely uninterested in the same things". Now read on See David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury's campus novels for the next generation of Lucky Jims; Rachel Cusk's work has an Amis-like acidity to it. Adaptations Lucky Jim was filmed in 1957; several other works were televised, and The Old Devils has been staged. Recommended biography You Can't Do Both (1994) is semi-autobiographical; in 1991 he published his Memoirs, the barbed nature of which shocked reviewers. Eric Jacobs completed a biography in 1998; Martin Amis is currently working on a memoir about his relationship with his father - "almost a pro bono duty".

Criticism The Anti-Egotist by Paul Fussell (1994) argues against the popular view of Amis as boozy reactionary. Useful links and work online Background Kingsley Amis (Author of Lucky Jim) edit data Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE, was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered the English novelist Martin Amis . Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, Wandsworth, Couty of London (now South London), England, the son of William Robert Amis, a mustard manufacturer's clerk. He began his education at the City of London School, and went up to St. John's College, Oxford April 1941 to read English; it was there that he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, he was called up for Army service in July 1942. After serving in the Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE, was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher.

He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered the English novelist Martin Amis . Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, Wandsworth, Couty of London (now South London), England, the son of William Robert Amis, a mustard manufacturer's clerk. He began his education at the City of London School, and went up to St. John's College, Oxford April 1941 to read English; it was there that he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, he was called up for Army service in July 1942. After serving in the Royal Corps of Signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. Although he worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, he had by then decided to give much of his time to writing.

Martin Amis - Kingsley Amis - Writing and Writers - Books - Authors - The New York Times The New York Times Correction Appended Ben Jonson wrote: “Greatness of name in the father oft-times helps not forth, but overwhelms the son; they stand too near one another. The shadow kills the growth.” This Oedipal principle applies to all sorts of professions, but few more so than the literary one. It’s not unheard of for the child of an author to try his hand at writing. Stephen King’s two sons are writers, and so is one of John Updike’s. Hilma Wolitzer’s daughter Meg is a novelist, as is Anita Desai’s daughter Kiran, whose second book just won the Booker Prize — an award that has so far eluded her mother. But writers’ offspring tend to go into the family business with far less regularity than, say, the children of doctors or lawyers, and it seldom happens that over the long haul, and in the deepening shade, the younger equals or outstrips the elder — the way that Anthony Trollope, to take a famous example, bested his mother, Fanny.

The exception these days is the curious writerly firm of Amis & Amis, founded by Kingsley, who died in 1995, and now run by his son Martin. Kingsley Amis, an indelible figure in British letters, is the subject of an immense and sympathetic new biography by Zachary Leader (published this month in the United States) that has already caused a stir in England both by reminding readers of how funny Kingsley could be and because of its frankness about his personal life. (Leader is a friend of Martin’s, who encouraged him to write the book and put no restrictions on him.) Martin, meanwhile, who published his first novel when he was just 24, has recently brought out his 10th, “House of Meetings,” and at 57 is arguably writing better than Kingsley was at the same age. He is a more daring and inventive novelist than his father — unafraid in “London Fields,” for example, to wheel out the whole tool chest of postmodern tricks — and in books like “Money,” about a would-be filmmaker spiraling out of control on both sides of the Atlantic, nearly as funny but on a much bigger canvas.

Martin likes to say that he is of an age now when looking at himself in the mirror in the morning is like watching a low-budget horror movie with particularly lurid special effects. In fact, he has maintained most of the brooding good looks that were his trademark as a young man, though the “rug,” as Amis characters tend to call not a toupee but their own head of hair, is going a little thin on top. He wears black a lot and goes in for that dandified Brit touch of French cuffs without cufflinks. “I really do think I was blessed by Kingsley in that I really don’t get worked up or upset the way many of my contemporaries do,” he said over lunch a couple of months ago in New York, speaking in a slow, mid-Atlantic drawl in which the vowels are sometimes elongated for emphasis. “I never thought it was anything out of the way being a writer, but for them it’s been a struggle for legitimacy. It doesn’t astound me that I’m a writer, because what your dad does is banal by definition.

It never seemed a big deal.” In this country, Martin may in fact be a bigger deal than his father was, and Leader’s biography begins with an assertion that may strike American readers as extreme: “Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of the second half of the 20th century but a dominant force in the writing of the age.” We know Kingsley mostly by his two best books, which happen to bracket his career: “Lucky Jim” (1954), one of the funniest novels ever written, and “The Old Devils” (1986), a late masterpiece about the indignities of old age. In England, though, his 23 other novels are more highly regarded than they are here, where some of his later books were championed by right-wing critics but denounced elsewhere for being reactionary and misogynistic. He was also a public personality who appeared often on TV, in the gossip columns and even in a series of advertisements for upscale fabrics (“Very Kingsley Amis, Very Sanderson”) that were the British equivalent of those ads Lillian Hellman used to do for Blackglama.

Continue reading the main story That Kingsley was an enthusiastic drinker and philanderer (someone who “lived for adultery,” his son says) was well known to most of his British readers, who watched with amusement or dismay as he turned himself over the years from a handsome young socialist into a monstrous caricature of an old buffer: fat, reactionary, alcoholic, rude and intolerant. He grew so devoted to the queen (who knighted him in 1990) that he had erotic dreams about her. They usually began, Martin says, with Sir Kingsley attempting to paw the royal chest and Her Majesty protesting: “No, no, Kingsley. We mustn’t.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story In England, Martin is a public figure in his own right, with a reputation so large that the press is always trying to whack him down. “Smarty Anus,” the magazine Private Eye used to call him. He has the kind of sexual glamour more often associated with movie stars than with novelists, and in restaurants young men sometimes pretend to know him just to impress their girlfriends. But Kingsley’s shadow is still so broad and long-lived that Martin is often damned for being too much like his father or else not enough.

His 1991 novel, “Time’s Arrow,” for example, which rewinds time backward to tell the story of the Holocaust, was criticized in some quarters for being much too serious. “House of Meetings,” which is about two brothers in the Gulag and which the novelist and critic John Banville has called “a version of the great Russian novel done in miniature,” has generally been greeted as a return to form after Martin’s previous novel, “Yellow Dog,” which was energetically slammed. But some critics have complained that it, too, is overly serious and moralistic — not sufficiently Kingsley-like, in other words. Since returning to London after two and a half years in Uruguay (his second wife, Isabel Fonseca, is half-Uruguayan and they built a house there), Martin has lately set about filling what one observer called a “Martin-sized” hole in English life. He has been visible everywhere, and both on TV and in a 12,000-word article in The Observer, he has been an outspoken critic of Islamism. He has also laid into British liberals for general anti-Semitism and for being too ready to criticize Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.

To his critics on the left, all this is evidence that Martin is turning into Kingsley — another preachy old right-wing curmudgeon. And when it was announced in February that he had accepted a job teaching writing at the University of Manchester, that was also interpreted as following in the footsteps of the old man, who taught for years before his writing career took off. None of these criticisms are entirely fair. Kingsley’s politics were all over the place and were never particularly well thought out. He was a knee-jerk liberal for a while, and then he became a knee-jerk reactionary. Martin’s politics are, if anything, naïvely earnest (one of the criticisms of his nonfiction book “Koba the Dread,” about Stalinism, was that it sometimes read as if the author thought it was news that Stalin was a murderer), but they are also the considered product of a lot of reading and discussion. His old friend Christopher Hitchens, who has not always agreed with Martin’s positions, says: “Once he gets seized on a topic, he’s got a bulldog grip.

He’s like a lawyer getting on top of the case — he can give himself completely to a subject.” Aside from publishing books that are mostly comic, moreover, Kingsley and Martin aren’t much alike as writers. Kingsley’s comedy stems from precise social observation. Martin’s characters tend to be caricatures and exaggerations, as their names suggest — Keith Talent, John Self, Guy Clinch, Clint Smoker — and he is more of a satirist and a moralist than his father was, with a vision of the world that is gloomy and scabrous. The shadow of nuclear annihilation hovers over “London Fields,” and “Yellow Dog” evokes a world run by thugs and pornographers.

Father and son also used to disagree all the time about conspicuous literary style, or what Kingsley called “a high idiosyncratic noise level in the writing.” Martin recalled not long ago: “He was always saying, ‘I think you need more sentences like “He put down his drink, got up and left the room,” ’ and I thought you needed rather fewer of them.” A more typical Martin sentence tends to be maximalist and attention-grabbing, a riff with all the speakers turned up high, as in this “Augie March”-like streetscape from the beginning of “Money”: I strode through the meat-eating genies of subway breath. I heard the ragged hoot of sirens, the whistles of two wheelers and skateboarders, pogoists, gocarters, windsurfers. I saw the barrelling cars and cabs, shoved on by the power of their horns. I felt all the contention, the democracy, all the italics, in the air. These are people determined to be themselves, whatever, little shame attending.

Urged out from the line of shufflers and idlers, watchers, pavement men, a big blond screamer flailed at the kerb, denouncing all traffic. His hair was that special mad yellow, like an omelette, a rug omelette. Photo Author, Author: Martin and Kingsley Amis in the late 1970s. Credit Dmitri Kasterine If Martin has a true literary father, in fact, it’s not Kingsley but Saul Bellow, to whom he became quite close in the mid-80s and whose leather jacket and down coat he now owns, as if literally inheriting the mantel. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, where the two Amises most overlap is in their history with women. By all accounts, Kingsley, who in early photographs sometimes resembles a 1940s matinee idol, seldom met one who turned him down, and Martin for a while was the literary equivalent of a rock star.

Before his first marriage, to Antonia Phillips, he was romantically involved with Claire Tomalin, Tina Brown, Emma Soames, Gully Wells, Julie Kavanagh, Victoria Rothschild and the model Angela Gorgas, among a great many others. “Everything fell before his scythe,” Hitchens told me recently. “I used to go with him to parties, and I felt I was just holding his coat.” He added that he knew of at least one instance in which father and son both slept with the same woman, though not at the same time, and that Kingsley, when he heard about it, said proudly, “Like father, like son.” Martin said last winter: “I think most of my contemporaries had much more difficult relationships with their fathers than I did, because those fathers were very much against the generation that was emerging in the ’60s — free love, long hair, pacifism, drugs. I think there was a great deal of sexual envy masquerading as high principle. But my father never laid an obstacle in front of my brother and me on that front. The idea of promiscuity excited him.

When my brother and I were about 14 or 15, he took us out and bought us a gross of condoms.” Born in 1922, Kingsley grew up in Norbury, an unfashionable suburb of London, as the pampered, overprotected only child of a couple just barely clinging to the middle class. His father was a clerk at the Colman mustard company and the sort of Monty Python Englishman who thought it was droll to pretend to be deaf or foreign when in a pub or a train. His mother spoon-fed the young Kingsley until he was 12 or 13, and Leader suggests that all his life he remained in some ways a kind of overgrown infant, so greedy and avid for pleasure that as an adult he once announced, “I want more than my share before anyone else has had any.” From childhood on, Kingsley also suffered from claustrophobia and panic attacks. He never learned to drive and was afraid to fly or even to be alone at night. When Martin’s younger sister, Sally, was about to be born, Kingsley was afraid to go to the phone booth to call the midwife unless Martin, who was then 4, accompanied him.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story That their father did not call upon Martin’s brother, Philip, then 5, is telling. Of the three Amis children, Martin enjoyed the easiest, most trusting relationship with his father. Philip, a graphic designer, had a far rockier time growing up, and Sally died of alcoholism at 46. Martin’s mother, Hilly, once said that he was “born under a lucky star.” Hitchens says that “Martin is a pretty good instance of birth order being a good protection” and adds that “a lot of Martin’s ruthless commitment to hard work is because both his siblings flaked out.” Kingsley met Hilly Bardwell — or Hilary, to use her full name — in 1946, when she was a 17-year-old art student and he, six years older, had just returned to Oxford, which he was attending on a scholarship after a stint in the army.

They had a memorable early date at a coffee shop where Hilly, who came from a prosperous family (it became the model, in fact, for the twittish, slightly preposterous Welch family in “Lucky Jim”) and had been brought up to think well of everyone, found herself in the company of a man muttering things like “Look at those fools, look at that idiot of a man.” A year or so later, Hilly was pregnant, and after urging her to have an abortion , Kingsley got cold feet and instead they married. Philip, named for Kingsley’s best friend, the poet Philip Larkin, was born in August 1948, and Martin followed 375 days later. Soon after, the Amises moved to Swansea, in Wales, where Kingsley taught English at University College and embarked upon his career of epic promiscuity.

In time, hurt and perhaps a little vengeful, Hilly began having affairs, too, and in many respects Leader’s account of the Amises’ Swansea begins to sound a lot like John Updike’s Tarbox, the setting for “Couples.” The wife of a local rugby fan sent him the team schedule, for example, so they could arrange assignations on game days, and the poet Al Alvarez, a weekend guest, remembered a Saturday-night party when Kingsley disappeared with each of the women there in turn, while everyone else sat around pretending not to notice. Though hardly in her husband’s league, Hilly fooled around sufficiently that when Sally was born in 1954, it was far from certain she was Kingsley’s daughter. In 1958, the Amises spent the year at Princeton (or Budweiser College, as Kingsley calls it in his novel “One Fat Englishman,” where all American colleges are named after beer), and the partying, drinking and wife-swapping took on the properties of Cheever’s Shady Hill, with Kingsley making passes at every woman he saw and succeeding more often than not.

“There was no scandal left in who had slept with Kingsley,” Betty Fussell writes in her memoir “My Kitchen Wars.” “Who hadn’t?” All the while, however, Kingsley was steadily writing. Compared with Martin, he was a late bloomer. “Lucky Jim,” Kingsley’s first novel, came out when he was 31, after he had abandoned three efforts and had finished but failed to publish a fourth, which was rejected more than a dozen times. Leader demonstrates that in revising “Lucky Jim,” Kingsley was helped substantially by Philip Larkin, who advised him to “sod up the romantic business actively” — meaning make it more of a love story — and went through the manuscript line by line, writing comments like “This speech might come from a stage play TOO BAD to be produced” and “GRUESOME AROMA OF B” (“bum,” presumably). This is how Amis and Larkin always talked and wrote to each other — in language that was vulgar, sarcastic, typographically ingenious and often hilarious.

Martin says he now believes that Larkin secretly hated Kingsley out of sexual envy, but their friendship, though complicated, was nevertheless a sustaining one for both writers, whose correspondence may be the most entertaining in all of English literature. Photo Not-So-Angry Young Man: Kingsley and Hilary in the mid-1950s with, from left, Sally, Philip and Martin. Credit Daniel Farson/Getty Images “Lucky Jim,” a novel about a lazy, angry, hangover-ridden lecturer at a provincial college, almost instantly became a best seller — perhaps another secret point of friction with Larkin — and introduced something new in English letters, a voice that was defiantly at odds with the snobbery and artiness of the Bloomsbury generation, and even with Evelyn Waugh’s kind of comedy, set among the Bright Young Things. For a while Kingsley was considered one of the original Angry Young Men. “Lucky Jim” also loosed in Kingsley an almost unceasing flood of productivity — poems, essays and journalism, as well as novels.

At the end of his life, when he was suffering the effects of a lifetime of hard drinking and possibly of early Alzheimer’s, he was unable to give up the habit of hours at the typewriter, even if it was just to type the word “seagulls” over and over. In 1963, Kingsley shattered his family by running off with and eventually marrying the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, whom he had met at a literary conference. The children were devastated, and Hilly plunged into depression and pill-taking. Essentially left to fend for themselves, Martin and Philip skipped school, smoked a lot of dope and hung around coffee shops and Wimpy bars in flared velvet trousers and big-collared shirts while trying to pick up girls — until Jane, as she was called, determined they would be better off living not with their mother but with her and Kingsley. Philip never got along with his stepmother and finally left home when a box boldly labeled “PHIL’S DRUGS” was discovered in his dresser, not very carefully hidden. But for Martin, who had bounced from school to school and was at best an indifferent pupil, the new arrangement was a godsend.

Jane took responsibility for his education, encouraged him to go to a crammer, or tutoring school, and urged him to apply to Oxford. He not only got in but studied so diligently that he graduated with a first in English. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy In Martin’s memoir, “Experience,” there is a passage describing what seems to be a series of idyllic weekend visits to Lemmons, a large house Kingsley and Jane had bought on Hadley Common, outside London. There was always a barrel of whiskey on hand, he writes, along with a walk-in pantry stocked with food, and “with Kingsley the hub of all humour and high spirits, like an engine of comedy . . . I felt so secure in that house — and, clearly, so insecure elsewhere — that I always experienced a caress of apprehension as I climbed into the car on Sunday night.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Martin says now of Kingsley in that period: “It was his zenith, but emotionally he was already shutting down” — meaning in part that the marriage had started to go bad.

The relationship between Kingsley and Jane was based largely on sexual attraction, and by the mid-70s he had lost interest in sex or become unable to perform, or both. He was also drinking so heavily that an evening often ended with him crawling up the stairs on all fours. During the day, Kingsley was a fixture at the Garrick, a club in the West End, where he enjoyed afternoonlong lunches. According to Leader, his bar bill ran to more than 1,000 pounds a month. In 1980, after Kingsley spurned her ultimatum that he quit drinking, Jane walked out. His father was “heartsick and romantically mortified” over the breakup, Martin says in “Experience,” and eventually he became bitter and misogynistic as well. The novels of this period, “Jake’s Thing” and “Stanley and the Women,” are filled with loathing and world-weariness. And this was also the period when what had partly been a put-on — the persona of the reactionary philistine — began to rigidify into something real and permanent.

Kingsley became the very sort of person he used to make fun of, declaring, for example, that England’s best living writer was Dick Francis and that henceforth he wanted only to read books that began, “A shot rang out.” Christopher Hitchens says he thinks that the process of self-ossification was pretty much complete by 1984. “I remember that Martin, Kingsley and I all had dinner, and then we went to see ‘Beverly Hills Cop,’ ” he said a few weeks ago. “Naturally, you couldn’t go to anything French or Japanese or Polish. All through the movie Kingsley was laughing with what we assumed was pretend mirth, and afterward he announced, ‘Yes, an absolutely flawless masterpiece.’ Suddenly it became clear he wasn’t joking and that he meant to defend the virtues of the film with absolute fidelity.

It was a very striking moment — the sense that the face had grown to fit the mask and that the pose had become himself.” When his marriage broke up, it was apparent that Kingsley was incapable of living by himself, and after a few weeks of what they called “Dadsitting,” Philip and Martin devised a scheme of the sort that only the British could dream up: they invited Hilly and her third husband, the impoverished Lord Kilmarnock, to come live with their father. From the outside, the arrangement looked like a ménage, but in fact Hilly and her husband, so broke that she had been selling hot dogs from a van next to a highway, were hired caretakers, and it amused Kingsley no end to be waited on by a peer of the realm. “We expected it to last about six months,” Martin said recently over dinner in London. “You kept saying to yourself, ‘It’s an odd arrangement, but then we’re odd people.’ ” In fact, the arrangement lasted 15 years, or until the end of Kingsley’s life, and it made possible “The Old Devils,” which won the Booker Prize in 1986.

Most of the burden of caring for Kingsley fell upon Hilly, who complained little and in fact emerges as the true heroine of Leader’s biography. “My mother had to suffer a very outrageous, childish set of demands,” Martin added. “But it gave her somewhere to live, and it gave him a great second lease. He would have died in his mid-60s without her.” He paused and then said: “ ‘The Old Devils’ is a great thawing, and it all came about through my mother really — her coming back into his life and reminding him of why he loved women. He valued her and all that, but he didn’t see that she was extraordinary, which she was.” He went on to say how tolerant and nonjudgmental his mother had always been and said: “I get as least as much from her as I ever got from him. I’m certain of that.” Photo Not-So-Angry Older Man: Kingsley and Elizabeth Jane Howard at their wedding reception in 1965.

Credit Solo/Zuma Press Martin is remarkably tolerant and forgiving of the failings in his father, about whom he writes fondly in the pages of “Experience,” and his childhood and adolescence — a nightmare by most standards — he recalls as idyllic. Hitchens, who got to know both Amises when he was in his 20s and who delivered an affectionate eulogy at Kingsley’s funeral, says, “I never knew a father and grown-up son who got along more comfortably.” The novelist Ian McEwan, another old friend of Martin’s, said: “I’m not sure Kingsley was a great father, but Martin was a wonderful son. He has a fantastic degree of psychological resilience — it’s not a virtue, just a fact. Many of us would have wilted under Kingsley, but some quirk enabled Martin to flourish and to be entirely himself. I don’t know any other friends of mine who had that ease with their fathers, which is especially remarkable when you consider that Kingsley didn’t even like Martin’s books.” Actually, he did like the first one, “The Rachel Papers,” which is a coming-of-age story, and even left Martin a note saying so.

But he was unable to finish the second, “Dead Babies,” a dark, twisted country-house comedy that is in certain ways the most Kingsley-like of all Martin’s books. “He just couldn’t get on with it — he said this with an apologetic look,” Martin said. “He was unable to lie about it — I would have just lied.” He went on, mentally ticking off his books: “ ‘Success’ — he said the beginning and end worked but not the middle. He was quite scornful about ‘Other People.’ He read the first chapter of ‘Money’ ” — the novel many critics consider Martin’s best — “but then the minute a character named Martin Amis came in, he threw it across the room. He wasn’t having any of that. No buggering around with the reader.” (Curiously, Leader has discovered that a character named Kingsley Amis figures in an unpublished novel, and the same device turns up again in “The Green Man,” one of Kingsley’s better books.) “But the ‘Dead Babies’ moment was stunning,” Martin said. “It was stunning. Eventually it became of special interest to me what he thought, but not, I didn’t think, of special authority.

He thought, really, that I was the best of a bad lot.” In another conversation, Martin said: “I’m beginning to understand just what a dreadful curse it can be, the novelistic ego. And I think whatever complications being the son of Kingsley involved me in, that’s been a help. This curse, the way it works is that any praise you get is instantly assimilated, and it just brings you up to where you should have been already. But any criticism just jangles around in your head and makes you stay up at night. Kingsley says somewhere in his letters that nothing quite lays you open so much as a novel, and so for a lot of my friends, a lot of the time, their thoughts are almost poisoned by criticism.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story For Martin to suggest that he is immune may be a little disingenuous. Some of his friends say that he moved to Uruguay in part because he was so wounded by the unusually harsh reviews of “Yellow Dog.” Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, said it “bears as much relation to Mr.

Amis’s best fiction as a bad karaoke singer does to Frank Sinatra.” In The London Telegraph, Tibor Fischer said it was “not-knowing-where-to-look bad” and like “your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating.” For years now, Martin has had a contentious relationship with British journalists, whom he likens to mullahs. “They whip up hysteria,” he explained. “Journalists are more powerful now than they’ve ever been, and we all know what power does. Anyone who disses the media is really asking for it. But it is the case that the journalists are what they are — world famous for vulgarity, alcoholism, spite.” The onset of hostility on both sides probably dates from 1994, an annus horribilis in which Martin’s separation from his first wife and their two children became tabloid fodder. Then, to make things worse, he left his longtime agent, Pat Kavanagh, who happened to be the wife of his friend Julian Barnes, for the American agent Andrew Wylie, whom the British press promptly christened “the Jackal” — a nickname that has stuck ever since.

(Barnes, who has since reconciled with Martin, didn’t speak to him for years.) Wylie succeeded in negotiating a $800,000 advance — a sum that was denounced as excessive — for Martin’s novel “The Information,” a book, as it happens, about the rivalry between two novelists who pretend to be friends, one popular and successful, the other arty and impoverished. What stirred up even more frenzy — an “Eisteddfod of hostility,” according to Martin — was the revelation that Martin intended to spend part of it getting his teeth fixed. To read some accounts from the time, it was as if he had decided he wanted to look like Liberace. (In fact, truly rotten dentition is a curious subtheme in Martin’s writing — there is a character in “Dead Babies” who can think of nothing but the poor state of his teeth — and “Experience” contains more accounts of excruciating dental surgery than many readers will have tolerance for.) “It’s nothing rational — it’s love gone wrong,” Ian McEwan said of Martin’s relationship with the press. “A lot of young journalists are dazzled by Martin, his style, his success. They want to be him.

And so what you have is a fever of covert parricide, a frantic, unexamined jealousy that is actually akin to longing.” In New York a couple of months ago, Martin said, laughingly, of some of his critics: “How have I attached myself to these people who have spent hundreds of hours with me — who know my stuff better than I do — and all they can think to say is competitive, vitriolic stuff? Who are these ingrates?” Martin is not a health nut these days but fit enough to play serious tennis and is even thinking about giving up cigarettes, which he hand-rolls from tobacco as black as coal. (Smoking is another vice Kingsley encouraged. Starting at age 5, Martin and Philip were each allowed to smoke a cigarette on Christmas Day; when they were 9, they got a whole pack.) For the time being, he is living in Bayswater with Isabel and their two young daughters, Fernanda and Clio, while a house he owns in Regent’s Park is still being let to tenants.

He is a far more attentive father than Kingsley ever was and recently, while Isabel was away, plunged into the morning drill of getting the girls up and dressed and off to school — a routine that would surely have been beyond his father. (“I think Kingsley always admired me as a sort of operative in the field,” Martin told me once. “I could go on airplanes, drive a car, be in a house by myself — remarkable things like that.”) Martin is also very close to Louis and Jacob, his sons by his first marriage, now at college in England, and to Delilah Seale, a 30-year-old daughter he didn’t meet until 12 years ago. (Her mother was Lamorna Seale, with whom Martin had a brief affair and who later killed herself.) A topic that comes up sometimes in conversation with Martin is where Kingsley went wrong, and Martin says he thinks it’s that with age he became a dogmatist of pessimism. “You have to distinguish between what is universal for your age group — that feeling that everything is going to hell, ubi sunt, and the rest — and what is reality,” he said last winter.

“Kingsley never even tried to distinguish between that feeling in himself and how things really were. I try to test myself on that score because I believe that a writer has a solemn duty to be cheerful and to guard against the failures of tolerance which characterize age. Kingsley was an absolutist in that how he saw it was how it was. I’m very on guard against that. I don’t want it.” He added: “I don’t want this to get out of control or I’ll be drowning in schmaltz, but it all starts to look very beautiful now that I know I’m not going to be around indefinitely. You know, the way that to a prisoner condemned to death, water tastes delicious, the air tastes sweet, a bread-and-butter sandwich makes tears spring to the eye.” Correction: May 6, 2007 An article on April 22 about the writers Kingsley and Martin Amis omitted a word in a quotation from Kingsley’s biographer, Zachary Leader. He referred to Kingsley as “the finest British comic novelist of the second half of the 20th century,” not the finest comic novelist.

Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The New York Times. Amazon.com: Books Books Books Advanced Search New Releases Best Sellers The New York Times® Best Sellers Children's Books Textbooks Textbook Rentals Sell Us Your Books Best Books of the Month Kindle eBooks Martin Amis Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Amis's work centres on the excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Martin Amis - Literature Literature Tom Craig at Bill Charles Agency Martin Amis Biography Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949, the son of the writer Kingsley Amis. He was educated in schools in Britain, Spain and the USA, and graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with First Class Honours in English. He wrote and published his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), while working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. The novel won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1974 and was followed by Dead Babies in 1975.

He was Literary Editor of the New Statesman between 1977 and 1979, publishing his third novel, Success, in 1978. Regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction, Amis is often grouped with the generation of British-based novelists that emerged during the 1980s and included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. His work has been heavily influenced by American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. A loose trilogy of novels set in London begins with Money: A Suicide Note (1984), a satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed, continues with London Fields (1989), and concludes with The Information (1995), a tale of literary rivalry. Time's Arrow (1991), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Other books include Night Train (1997), a pastiche of American detective fiction, an acclaimed volume of autobiography, Experience (2000) - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - and Koba the Dread, a non-fiction work about communism in the twentieth century (2002). Amis is also the author of several collections of essays, including The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), and The War Against Cliché (2001), which includes essays and book reviews. His two collections of short stories are Einstein's Monsters (1987), and Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998). House of Meetings (2006), takes the form of a novella and two short stories, and The Second Plane (2008), is a book of essays and short stories. He is a regular contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and journals, including the Sunday Times, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times.

He was awarded an honorary LittD by the University of East Anglia in 2000, and was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. His books include The Pregnant Widow (2010), Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012), London Fields (2014) and The Zone of Interest (2014). Martin Amis lives in Brooklyn, New York. Critical perspective ‘I don’t want to write a sentence that any guy could have written,’ says Martin Amis. As Adam Mars Jones has written, these unmistakable sentences have been some of the most important in modern British fiction, “the voice in a generation’s ear, charming without charm, insistently dazzling, milking the paradoxes until their teats are sore and they have no more nourishment to give. It’s easy to write Amis-like sentences, hard to write good ones” (London Review of Books, June, 2012) Martin Amis has been for upwards of 35 years the By Appointment purveyor of classic sentences to the reading public.

In Money (1984) he achieved something that was as much of a breakthrough for our insular literature as Bellow’s had been in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) for American writing, a manner electric, impure and unimpressed, except sometimes by itself, mixing refracted slang with swaggeringly artificial cadence. As the New York Times puts it, its “rollicking, repulsive picture of London and New York in the late 20th century, awash in cash, corruption, pornography, junk food, junk art, self-promotion and wretched excess of every imaginable variety” was borne forth on a devastatingly effective overflow of virtuosic sentences. If it seems astonishing that Money is now nearly as old as Augie March was when Money itself was published, then the reason must be the aura that certain books take on, of seeming to inhabit the permanent present they have defined. These books stand out, even if you can see their flaws, sending a little pulse of shock not just into the future, producing wave after wave of imitators, but into the past, making recently viable styles seem to recede into distance.

To say the least, it is not a manner that appeals to everyone. Just as Amis once confessed (or boasted) that he stopped finding Madonna attractive when she went ‘hard-body’, so there are readers in good numbers who prefer something suppler in their sentences than articulated armour-plate and an almost arthropod vision of imaginative prose. Many of these disaffected readers are likely to be female. When Amis insisted on a bidding war for The Information, the last volume of his loose West London trilogy, prospective publishers examined his sales figures, which were lower than his reputation would have suggested. Women, who tend to buy more books than men, were tending to buy relatively few of these ones. It is this sense of a primary responsibility towards Style which so distinguishes Amis’s writing – and so divides his admirers and detractors. For some, the energy and extravagance of his work, his distinctive voice, are the hallmarks of a writer of particular importance. James Wood, for instance, argues that Amis’s ‘word-coining power’ and ‘verbal and formal ambition’ have been crucial forces for the revitalization of the novel in English since the 1970s.

Amis is singular in his ready articulation of the language and mores of the moment, and in his conscious relation to movements in the contemporary European and, above all, American novel (Nabokov and Bellow are two major influences). He is, in his own way ‘addicted to the twentieth century’ (like his character John Self in Money: A Suicide Note, 1984), engrossed in the themes, riffs and rhythms of the millennial, apocalyptic metropolis.

The force of his satirical and comic imagination is concentrated in prose of energy and wit: one can take phrases at random from his novels which illustrate the point – from London Fields (1989),‘Guy had grown up in the age of mediated atrocity; like everyone else, he was exhaustively accustomed to the sad arrangements, the pathetic postures of the dead’; Terry, the narrator of Success (1978), sees himself ‘as a connoisseur of ennui, as satiety’s scholar’; in Time’s Arrow (1991), the same dexterity and precision is in the service of a different tone, as when the narrator notes that ‘something enveloped me, something that was all ready for my measurements, like a suit or a uniform, over and above what I wore, and lined with grief’. For other readers, however, this verbal ingenuity is shallow, its author overly concerned with the glister of the sentence at the expense of the realised aesthetic whole. Jason Cowley describes Amis as ‘a turbocharged cartoonist’, trapped in ‘the monotonous sublime of caricature’.

His aspirations to writing of a broad, normative moral significance or resonance – aspirations consistently explicit in the austere severity of his critical journalism and occasional writing (a substantial and impressive achievement, usefully collected in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, 1986, and The War Against Cliché, 2001) – remain, for such critics, under-realised in the fiction, despite the ready address to ‘Big Themes’ such as the Holocaust (Time’s Arrow); or nuclear catastrophe and apocalypse (Einstein’s Monsters, 1987; London Fields). The argument was at its fiercest around the publication of Time’s Arrow, a fictional autobiography, narrated in reverse by the uncomprehending and repressed soul of the Nazi doctor Odilo Unverdorben. This dazzling, troubling work is a rhetorical and technical tour de force, but its very success in this regard – in its voicing of the unspeakable – opens the novel to accusations of opportunism and impropriety. Its subtitle ‘The Nature of the Offence’ indicates the serious intent; this is a search to locate meaning in the Holocaust and a quest for lost innocence, even for repair of the century’s trauma.

In a review of Saul Bellow’s work, Amis remarks admiringly that, ‘To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work’. It is clearly a challenge to which Amis also responds and it is a tribute to the quality of his writing, and his determination over three decades, that the critical debate about his prose has largely replaced prurient attention given to controversies attending his person. For long the ‘Bad Boy’ of British Fiction, Amis was criticized for his persistent attention to sexual themes (pornography, sado-masochism and the sex trade are common features in his novels) and his eager documenting of the more vicious fatuities of contemporary living, an attention which, it was argued, shows too much relish for its ugly subject matter. His private life gained, for a novelist, unprecedented negative exposure. High-profile episodes such as the break with his agent over the size of an advance on one novel brought accusations of avarice and greed; marital discord was taken to confirm the identification between author and the more the unsavoury male figures of his novels.

Above all, Amis spent many years in the shadow of comparisons to his father, Kingsley, a dominant figure in the post-war English novel, and by all accounts also a daunting paterfamilias. The turning point in his public reputation was arguably the publication of Martin’s disarming memoir, Experience (2000), which was favourably received as a mature, generous and surprisingly moving account of a difficult, even at points tragic, family life, revealing something of the author’s humility and vulnerability. As the title suggests, the work is about the painful process of the loss of innocence. An opening into ‘the geography of the writer’s mind’, the memoir centres on Amis’s changing relation to his father, but the narrative also weaves together Amis’s discovery that, as a young man, he had fathered a child of whom he knew nothing until her mother’s death; the story of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was a victim of Fred West, the notorious serial killer; and moving, acute examinations of the break-up of his own first marriage and its impact on his children.

Experience marks a radical shift in Amis’s writing, which alters significantly the perspective from which his oeuvre is to be perceived, acknowledging whilst reworking the known facts of the private life in order to explore the nature and determinants of one creative imagination. Jibes about the ready access enjoyed by Amis fils to the literary world ignore the pressure of critical intelligence and broad reading which characterize his work. If he was ‘tied by a quirk of birth to the writing life’ (Cowley), Amis has, as the bibliography above indicates, now more than served his apprenticeship. The early career as a literary journalist soon gave way to recognition as a cult-ish novelist producing a series of funny, dark, perverse tales of youth in the city (The Rachel Papers, 1973; Dead Babies, 1975; Other People: A Mystery Story, 1981). This status shifted dramatically with the triptych of bravura novels of the late 1970s and 1980s – Success, Money: A Suicide Note, and London Fields – which captured the chaos and energy of the Thatcherite period, and cemented Amis’s reputation as a foremost chronicler of contemporary London.

In the 1990s the work was more overtly political, explicitly engaging those ‘big themes’. There was also important experimentation with the short story genre, evidenced particularly in Heavy Water (1998), a collection characterized by the use of ‘doubles’ and ‘invented worlds’. The 2000s developed into one of Amis’s most productive decades in both fiction and non-fiction. The jolt in public mood from the calm solipsism of much of the 1990s to the world-historical urgency of the 2000s seemed something of a catalyst to his art. His talent for provocation and for amassing and exercising a variety of enemies remained acute and remarkably unsparing. The decade began with the political essay Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), which took aim at the complicity of the left for its alleged sympathy for Stalin and wilful blindness to his purges. Needless to say, it offended many of his former friends, and Christopher Hitchens offered a vituperative response in the Atlantic. His return to fiction with Yellow Dog (2003) resulted in a remarkable feeding frenzy in the British media.

Here, the later Amis’s voice once again erupted into satire and the themes of male violence, millennialism, sexual dysfunction and the groaning sewer of tabloid culture. But to many there were diminishing returns. In a famous hatchet-job, the novelist Tibor Fischer remarked that "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad … like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating. (The Guardian, August 2003) Laudably laughing in the face of such criticism, Amis retorted to his baying critics that "no one [today] wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are.” One of the stranger shifts in Amis’s writing came with the imaginative connection that he began to feel with world-historical events. Koba the Dread, for example, had been mocked for the way in which Amis had weaved the mass murder of political prisoners together with the cries of his own infant child sleeping at home. To many this was not only narcissism but distasteful and cloth-eared.

This personal investment and attempt to project himself into the zeitgeist resurfaced in equally troubling form with a pair of stories, originally scheduled for the collection House of Meetings (2006), which placed the novelist in the courtroom of Saddam Hussein, and most controversially of all, in the mind of the 11 September hijacker Muhammad Atta. By way of companion to these fictional experiments, Amis published a collection of essays on the War on Terror, The Second Plane (2008), which collated his prolific journalistic output on the topic, and attracted a combination of respectable sales, and wildly varying reviews. As Tim Adams observed in The Guardian in 2010, “for at least the past decade” Amis had “seemed intent on making the most distinctive comic voice in contemporary British fiction do the most unlikely things. He's put it in the mouths of historical tyrants and 9/11 plotters, he tried it out for size – for laughs – as an impotent monarch and – in earnest – as a survivor of Soviet purges”.

The appearance of The Pregnant Widow, with its return to the sexual intrigue and dark glamour of his early works such as Dead Babies, was therefore a major “relief”. The novel had originally been intended as more explicitly autobiographical, but had developed in the direction of fiction, set in the summer of 1970, with a thinly fictionalised Amis as 20-year old Keith Nearing, navigating the sexual revolution. To Edmund White in the New York Review of Books, it was a “return to form … a new depth brought to familiar themes.” Fittingly, given the obsessions of the past decade, one of those obsessions turned out to be the sleeping presence of Islam in his life in the form of previous lovers. During the furore surrounding Yellow Dog, Amis had found himself spending some years in Uruguay. But a more seemingly permanent departure came in 2010 as Amis moved to what he himself recognised as the somewhat clichéd novelist’s nirvana of a Brooklyn brownstone. Over his shoulder, he tossed one last grenade at his native country in the form of Lionel Asbo (2012), a scabrous condition-of-England work.

The novel centred on working-class Desmond Pepperdine and his antihero uncle Lionel Asbo (acronymically named after the Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, much-mocked instruments of dealing with petty crime in Tony Blair’s Britain) and their misadventures in the fictional Diston Town. Though Amis was careful to point out in interviews that this was a “fairytale world” rather than an accurate depiction of Britain, the savage satirical intent was unmistakably blunt. Unfortunately, for many, it was also embarrassingly off-the-mark, and was the subject of vicious ridicule in the British press. Even the usually sympathetic Telegraph thought that “as socio-political commentary, Lionel Asbo feels helplessly off course and out of date. Most of its main targets — pitbulls, hoodies, chavs, Jordan, lotto louts, I’m A Celebrity — feel about a decade old” (Tim Martin, 15 June 2012). Nonetheless, as ever there were sympathisers.

Some of his younger admirers such as the novelist Nicola Barker, seen by many as an inheritor of the Amis mantle, proved that the cathartic potential of his provocations was still alive: “Is [Lionel Asbo] an offensive book? Hell, yes. Deeply. But then maybe modern England needs offending” (The Observer, 10 June 2012). For decades, Amis has seemed to thrive on this cocktail of affection and abuse. As the Guardian noted in 2012, “Amis-bashing has long been a popular pastime in the British press”. The attention he receives, and the passions his fiercely vivid novels, stories and essays provoke, remains far beyond any of his contemporaries or those of younger authors, none of which has yet managed to unseat him as the current father of English letters. At their best, those famous sentences continue to be some of the most powerful in British fiction, and though it now seems more often to be for the wrong reasons, the publication of an Amis novel remains an event in contemporary writing.

Dr Sean Matthews 2004 and Dr Tom Wright 2013 Bibliography Martin Amis Web Reviews | Scholarship | Bibliographies | Affinities | Filmography | Intertexts | Discussion Since its creation in 1995, the Martin Amis Web has been the authoritative resource for information about Amis’s career and writing. The site is administered by Gavin Keulks, author of Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950 (2003) and editor of Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond (2006). Image Credits: personal photos © Isabel Fonseca, Robert Birnbaum, and Isabelle Levy; cover art courtesy The Random House Group, Ltd.

Question: What relation is author Kingsley Amis to author Martin Amis?
Answer: Father